Tip – Wanna keep people from seeing your metadata?

Have you ever published a photo somewhere (Flickr, your website, blog, etc…) and some one emails or comments to you and asks “Why’d you shoot that photo at f/16? Don’t you think f/11 would have been more appropriate?”. Or perhaps you’re delivering them to a client and you simply don’t want them to know all of the camera info (maybe you got a killer shot with a point-n-shoot but you don’t want them to know it ).

I call them Metadata Creepers. They creep into your images that you unknowingly posted all of the metadata for and look through only to ask you semi-irrelevant questions. Well there’s a way to automatically get rid of your camera info. When you go to File > Export and the Export dialog opens, you’ll see a small checkbox called “Minimize Embedded Metadata”.

Turn that on and Lightroom will keep any copyright information in the metadata but it’ll remove all of the camera-related stuff. Hope that helps. Have a great weekend everyone!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

14 Comments

If you want have full control about embedded metadata, you can add a script or batch file in “Post-Processing” and use ExifTool (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/). Under Windows a batch file removing all metadata looks like that:

Fully configurable and you can set up different presets for each different type of export. I have one for mail type exports which have little or nothing in except copyright and contact info and one for flickr type exports which have just about everything in.

I have no connection with this plugin (which is Donationware, pay what you feel) other than as a long time satisfied user.

I always do this now so my wedding clients don’t know how I got the results!!
Also if there are 2 of us shooting I tend to move pictures around in LR3 by changing the meta times, a wedding always feel better when it flows right, after this I then export and wipe all the metadata.
Amazing how valuable metadata can be to someone wanting to start in your form of photography, it doesn’t make them a photographer but sure gives them a good idea.

Another reason you would want to minimize meta data in LR is in PS versions earlier than CS4 if you make brush or gradient adjustments, PS versions before CS4 don’t play well with those images. When it comes to saving after you have done all PS work, you would have to select all copy and paste to a new untitled document. PS seems to not know how to write embedded meta data of the brush or gradient adjustments made in LR.
But this is only an issue for PS versions BEFORE CS4

Although for professionals I can see why protecting your metadata can be an issue, personally, I’ve bee grateful to those who have left it open over the years. It’s been a great resource as a learning tool.